ABSTRACT
At the end of my The Lie of the Land, reflecting on the difficulties that attend negotiations between colonizing and colonized peoples, even where common interests have apparently been identified, some questions are posed: ‘We could do worse than begin by reflecting on the mechanism of the negotiating table and the model of communication it implies. What does the polished, horizontal surface hoisted off the ground signify? What history of violence does its pretence of smoothness, its equalisation of places, conceal? We could do worse than ask: when did we in the West leave the ground?’2 Even this brief extract gives some indication of that book’s argument, and there is no reason to repeat it here. Rather than recapitulate the proposition that a new, possibly post-colonial polity depends on evolving a different poetics of exchange, it might be useful here to ground as it were that last seemingly rhetorical flourish.
